Responding to story on cemetery vandals

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Dear Editor:

I am the coordinator for the Barry County GenWeb site and I spend hours and hours each day recording cemeteries so that the history of our ancestors is preserved. Our volunteers have gone out in the community and taken photos and gathered up data that is simply amazing.

We have 8,000 web pages on-line of Barry County history and genealogy. Each web page is equal to about 20 hard copy pages so that is a lot of Barry County data that we have managed to record.

Barry County has been the featured county for the National GenWeb site now for 10 straight months. No other county in the United States has ever been chosen as a leading example for 10 months in a row.

Like any other genealogist, I can not imagine why anyone would destroy the final resting place of any of our ancestors. I am outraged at this and hope these vandals pay.

For whatever it means, I suggest that these destructive folks, be given 10 years of community service work, the type that requires them to repair cemetery stones in Barry County at their expense and under the inspection of the monument company there in Cassville so that it is done right.